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I think these criticisms aren't just relevant to HN, they apply to all social media and online conversation. Even (group) email can become quite toxic if people

I think these criticisms aren't just relevant to HN, they apply to all social media and online conversation. Even (group) email can become quite toxic if people don't convey their emotion well. I have been on HN for 15 years, I have spent far too much time on this site. Eventually you learn which topics will be "toxic" and avoid them (if you want to). To some extent it just maturity (or lack there of) but I actually think HN is far less toxic outside of some specific topics than other sites. The topics that are liable to become flame wars change over time, currently it seems to be anything "Crypto" or "Online Advertising" as people have very strong feelings on both sides. I'm certainly still guilty of getting drawn in at times, especially when I feel I have a horse in the race. There is always insightful comments in these threads too. Fortunately HN is designed to detect topics that are getting out of hand (far more comments than up votes) and they drop of the homepage quickly massively reducing the exposure. Exactly where this thread is already going. I think the best decision HN made was not breaking the site into categories or "Sub-HNs" where specific toxic topics can grow and mutate, everything is forced though the front page ensuring a level of self moderation. After 15 years on the site I have no intention of leaving it.

brightball 5y ago
This is the tamest and most well moderated forum I've experienced on the internet. For goodness sakes, I made a snarky comment about an NFT marketplace and was firmly warned about it by dang.
- Seirdy 5y ago
  Ehhh... I'd say tildes.net, most project-specific forums (Discourse instances for FLOSS projects come to mind: Fedora, Let's Encrypt, F-Droid, Signal, and others), several mailing lists, and perhaps even lobste.rs are far more constructive. I've noticed that HN is just like Reddit, Lemmy, and other up/down-vote based forums for threaded discussions in that it incentivizes one extremely predictable pattern: Commenters have a first impression of what an article will say before they finish reading it, or before they read it at all. They take this anticipation of what the article will say, form an opinion about it, and search for comments that validate that opinion. These comments get upvoted. Because of this, commenters have an incentive to not just validate common opinions about an article, but opinions about what an article may be about so they don't have to risk considering its content/views. This phenomenon applies to the comments too, to a lesser degree. There's a recursive effect going on that promotes bikeshedding. While it shares this characteristic, at leas the discussion quality is better than mainstream social media (FB, Reddit, etc); however, that's not even worth mentioning IMO because comparing a forum's quality to them would be an insult to said forum. Several far less active forums like littr, subreply, gurlic, and tilde.news are far less toxic so some of this is probably most apparent with some popularity. I will say that the moderation seems excellent, though.
  - celdon25 5y ago
    I am not aware of another forum in today's Internet that has discussion quality (or moderation quality for that matter) even comparable to HN.
    - Seirdy 5y ago
      I listed a few in the first paragraph, and a few relatively inactive ones near the bottom for a more slow-paced conversation.
    - kadendogthing 5y ago
      He gave a few examples, but to be honest HN filters for quantity over quality with topic discussion. It cargo cults academia but isn't actually very academic or novel. Spread out your thoughts in a PG style manner and make sure it's emotionally sparse and you're good. You can literally say nearly anything here, even to the point of it being disingenuous or hateful and it will stand.
      - zozbot234 5y ago
        It's hard to be very academic when discussions are as massive and short-lived as on HN. I think of Lobsters as a lot more academic than HN, and the fact that so very few people have posting privileges there is clearly a part of that.
  - blueflow 5y ago
    I've read the lobste.rs moderation log for a while and i think its a bad platform. pushcx bans first and considers second, there were several times users complained about it in the irc channel. I remember the time when the poster of the (at that moment) no. 1 post got banned for self-promotion, because it was a link to their own blog. The dataswamp domain ban also was a disgrace that looked like pushcx had no skin and a bad day.
    - throw10920 5y ago
      Oh, I thought it was just me - I was looking at the moderation log and thought to myself "is it just me, or is pushcx being awfully aggressive with the banhammer? nah, I probably just aren't seeing the really awful posts..." Although, you have to give him credit for a few well-justified bans from figures sometimes seen here on HN...
- User23 5y ago
  As is so often the case on Internet forums, I’ve erred and let myself get heated here from time to time. Of the thankfully rare interactions I’ve had with the moderation team, it’s always been a positive experience. I never felt like they were trying to punish, but rather to cultivate an intellectually rich forum where they want me to participate fruitfully. It’s a pretty thankless job, so I’ll take this opportunity to say thanks mod team, in particular thanks dang!
- deltaonefour 5y ago
  A lot of that kind of thing slips through the cracks. Dang misses a lot of stuff.
  - nomel 5y ago
    Even if he misses things, I think it sets the tone.
  - ddingus 5y ago
    Yeah, that is true though Dang has remarkably few peers when evaluated on effectiveness. That said, we see his efforts and when we model them, we amplify an already solid showing. That's how I choose to play it. Hope it helps. I think it does.
- danans 5y ago
  > the tamest and most well moderated forum It's the most well moderated free forum. I'm a member of some paid forums that is far better, but that makes sense because people don't like toxicity in something they have paid for.
  - labrador 5y ago
    > I'm a member of some paid forums that is far better Such as? I've been looking for someplace to pay for because it's better
    - danans 5y ago
      It's very topic/interest specific, not a general forum: Green Building Advisor. Also, I have some private email groups in which I only have thoughtful discussion with people I know and trust (though don't always agree with). I don't know if any general paid forums though.
      - tombert 5y ago
        There's Something Awful which is fairly general and charges a one time fee, but it's much more poorly operated than HN.
        zozbot234 5y ago
        SA used to be in a troll war with the old Slashdot.org tech forum. 4chan was a later 'spinoff' built by a Something Awful user, and taking much of its initial community from there. Given these facts I've never thought of Something Awful as especially free from toxicity.
        jart 5y ago
        They also used to be very toxic to the the Church of Scientology and Habbo Hotel. Nevar forget.
- aaomidi 5y ago
  It's also one of the most dog-whistled racist communities I've been on. Unfortunately, calling out that behavior gets you targeted as a SJW, or something else. But yeah, on some posts, I get really uncomfortable on HN.
  - paulpauper 5y ago
    like what example
  - gunfighthacksaw 5y ago
    I agree with your point of view even if I wouldn’t have phrased it like that. I’ve read / posted / shitposted stuff on here that would get me ratiod or yalled on other social networks, and would definitely lose me friends if I publicly repeated it, or family if I pushed it politically. I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head because I read hundreds of stories per week on here and only notice it when I see a (not downvoted) comment that makes me go WOOOOOOW.
    - aaomidi 5y ago
      Yeah I didn't really phrase it the right way when I posted that. But essentially my experience matches yours.
- titzer 5y ago
  Hardware Central forums circa 1998 was one of the funnest places that I recall. It was all overclockers and tinkers. It was pretty great!
- suifbwish 5y ago
  Same. If you compare this to reddit, it’s like comparing the senate to a local pub on free shots night.
- hutrdvnj 5y ago
  Sometimes I wonder if dang ever goes on vacation. Does he even sleep or take a break?
- blooalien 5y ago
  I was gonna say exactly this… It's absolutely true. Compared against almost every other comments/discussion forum I've tried/used, this is by far one of the overall generally sanest (free and open-ish) places on the modern web to participate in discussions.
mey 5y ago
Health, specifically diet/exercise, are also on this list of topics that typically get pretty toxic in my mind. Where the volume of voice outweigh the experts in the crowd.
sph 5y ago
> The topics that are liable to become flame wars change over time, currently it seems to be anything "Crypto" or "Online Advertising" as people have very strong feelings on both sides Oh yes, I've kept a very high opinion of this forum and its commenters once I skipped right past the daily 250+ comment posts about COVID-19 that have plagued us for 2 years. When it comes to tech, this place is an absolute treasure, but there's few things as odious as tech nerds improvising themselves as politicians, epidemiologists, microbiologists, logistics experts and activists just because they know how to use Google and follow some people on Twitter. The bitcoin craze wasn't even close to being as bad as the past two years.
- paulpauper 5y ago
  odious as tech nerds improvising themselves as politicians, epidemiologists, microbiologists, logistics experts and activists just because they know how to use Google and follow some people on Twitter. What is wrong with people do their own research, seeking their own info? Health experts, the mainstream media, and politicians do not have a monopoly on truth, and were wrong any times about Covid.
  - dageshi 5y ago
    I read through a lot of those threads, there wasn't much of value there, just angry people shouting at each other mostly. I'm not saying it should be banned, but I too stopped reading them eventually because what's the point?
  - ido 5y ago
    Just gently pointing out that you’re inviting the same heated discussion warned about above you.
    - paulpauper 5y ago
      I'm just disputing the notion that only experts are right. It's not about being pro-mask or anti-mask or pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine
  - 5y ago
_ktx2 5y ago
I'm a very sparing user of social media, but after work I do love to play games. I play games with people I know IRL as well as a litany of people I've never met - true to my old 90's and 00's gamer days. Now, there's Discord. I was pretty skeptical the first time people implored me to join a Discord server, but I've found some communities are very dope. I've discovered that managing peoples behavior online is like trying to herd sheep in a straight line. The flock always goes forward, that much is constant. There are sheep on the left and on the right side of the herd that push the herd onto a new trajectory, a lot of the time I don't think they even know what they're doing, but if you take a step back you can watch it occur in real-time. A leader, who likely doesn't know they're a leader, starts acting in a certain way, which causes the shift. Then another leader clashes with that leader by proxy, which is what I describe as the other side of the herd. These bounding behaviors almost never keep the flock constrained, they cause the flock to split. These leaders are disposable though. They're placeholders for culture, language, collections of experience, values, etc that people identify with. It takes having conversations with troublemakers and making their effects known in plain language. Some people will get it, moderate their behavior despite their culture, language, collections of experience, values etc and some won't. Those who won't will either leave on their own or get banned.
mistermann 5y ago
> I think these criticisms aren't just relevant to HN, they apply to all social media and online conversation. I believe the reason is that epistemology (generally: theory of knowledge, seeking/determining what is actually(!) True) is not just hard, but it goes counter to the natural workings of the human mind. If the topic of a thread is a psychology paper dealing with human perception, bias, this sort of thing (an abstract discussion of the phenomenon), few people have difficulty realizing and acknowledging that this is a fundamental problem, in/with reality. However, if the topic of discussion is an object level matter, particularly culture war issues (but even technical ones, as the author notes), the mind seems to run in a different mode - gone[1] is the knowledge that the mind is subject to imperfect thinking, replaced by ~"perception is reality". And, one's intuition might suggest that intelligent people would be less prone to this problem, but substantial evidence[2] suggests that this is not only not necessarily true, but that intelligence exacerbates the problem (if one is usually more often correct than others, it is perfectly reasonable that their default confidence level in being correct would increase). What I think is also interesting: it seems to me that this one fundamental idea could be one of the main root cause problems with human interaction on the internet (or, in general, really), a topic most people seem to be very interested in - but oddly, these same people almost without exception (in my experience) have zero (or less than) interest in identifying plausible root causes of the problem and contemplating/brainstorming solutions - the exact opposite of what one's intuition might predict. I have yet to encounter a single human being that is even marginally seriously interested in this idea (and many(!) who recoil from it), and I have talked to hundreds of people about it, often in meetups and other places where the general problem with people getting along, fake news, etc is literally the sole topic of conversation. I am not optimistic that humanity can solve a problem that their mind does not grant them access to (assuming my theory has some truth to it). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-dependent_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-dependent_memory [2] A word that causes tremendous discord when humans are discussing object level matters
- fragmede 5y ago
  There are four ways in which people disagree. First is just miscommunication which is easily clarified. Second is working from a different set of facts. Third is same facts, different interpretation. Lastly is same facts, same interpretation, different principles. Discourse online straddles the four, with an unhealthy amount of ego and stubborness thrown in for good (bad) measure. Without a good way to get people on the same page first, aka people don't even read the linked article before commenting (tbc, guilty of that myself), there's zero real hope of getting people interested in epistemology and why we get it so wrong. And who could blame them? Examining why you believe something central to your identity threatens it and is very uncomfortable, and most people simply aren't here for that.

brightball 5y ago

This is the tamest and most well moderated forum I've experienced on the internet. For goodness sakes, I made a snarky comment about an NFT marketplace and was firmly warned about it by dang.

Seirdy 5y ago
Ehhh... I'd say tildes.net, most project-specific forums (Discourse instances for FLOSS projects come to mind: Fedora, Let's Encrypt, F-Droid, Signal, and others), several mailing lists, and perhaps even lobste.rs are far more constructive. I've noticed that HN is just like Reddit, Lemmy, and other up/down-vote based forums for threaded discussions in that it incentivizes one extremely predictable pattern: Commenters have a first impression of what an article will say before they finish reading it, or before they read it at all. They take this anticipation of what the article will say, form an opinion about it, and search for comments that validate that opinion. These comments get upvoted. Because of this, commenters have an incentive to not just validate common opinions about an article, but opinions about what an article may be about so they don't have to risk considering its content/views. This phenomenon applies to the comments too, to a lesser degree. There's a recursive effect going on that promotes bikeshedding. While it shares this characteristic, at leas the discussion quality is better than mainstream social media (FB, Reddit, etc); however, that's not even worth mentioning IMO because comparing a forum's quality to them would be an insult to said forum. Several far less active forums like littr, subreply, gurlic, and tilde.news are far less toxic so some of this is probably most apparent with some popularity. I will say that the moderation seems excellent, though.
- celdon25 5y ago
  I am not aware of another forum in today's Internet that has discussion quality (or moderation quality for that matter) even comparable to HN.
  - Seirdy 5y ago
    I listed a few in the first paragraph, and a few relatively inactive ones near the bottom for a more slow-paced conversation.
  - kadendogthing 5y ago
    He gave a few examples, but to be honest HN filters for quantity over quality with topic discussion. It cargo cults academia but isn't actually very academic or novel. Spread out your thoughts in a PG style manner and make sure it's emotionally sparse and you're good. You can literally say nearly anything here, even to the point of it being disingenuous or hateful and it will stand.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      It's hard to be very academic when discussions are as massive and short-lived as on HN. I think of Lobsters as a lot more academic than HN, and the fact that so very few people have posting privileges there is clearly a part of that.
- blueflow 5y ago
  I've read the lobste.rs moderation log for a while and i think its a bad platform. pushcx bans first and considers second, there were several times users complained about it in the irc channel. I remember the time when the poster of the (at that moment) no. 1 post got banned for self-promotion, because it was a link to their own blog. The dataswamp domain ban also was a disgrace that looked like pushcx had no skin and a bad day.
  - throw10920 5y ago
    Oh, I thought it was just me - I was looking at the moderation log and thought to myself "is it just me, or is pushcx being awfully aggressive with the banhammer? nah, I probably just aren't seeing the really awful posts..." Although, you have to give him credit for a few well-justified bans from figures sometimes seen here on HN...
User23 5y ago
As is so often the case on Internet forums, I’ve erred and let myself get heated here from time to time. Of the thankfully rare interactions I’ve had with the moderation team, it’s always been a positive experience. I never felt like they were trying to punish, but rather to cultivate an intellectually rich forum where they want me to participate fruitfully. It’s a pretty thankless job, so I’ll take this opportunity to say thanks mod team, in particular thanks dang!
deltaonefour 5y ago
A lot of that kind of thing slips through the cracks. Dang misses a lot of stuff.
- nomel 5y ago
  Even if he misses things, I think it sets the tone.
- ddingus 5y ago
  Yeah, that is true though Dang has remarkably few peers when evaluated on effectiveness. That said, we see his efforts and when we model them, we amplify an already solid showing. That's how I choose to play it. Hope it helps. I think it does.
danans 5y ago
> the tamest and most well moderated forum It's the most well moderated free forum. I'm a member of some paid forums that is far better, but that makes sense because people don't like toxicity in something they have paid for.
- labrador 5y ago
  > I'm a member of some paid forums that is far better Such as? I've been looking for someplace to pay for because it's better
  - danans 5y ago
    It's very topic/interest specific, not a general forum: Green Building Advisor. Also, I have some private email groups in which I only have thoughtful discussion with people I know and trust (though don't always agree with). I don't know if any general paid forums though.
    - tombert 5y ago
      There's Something Awful which is fairly general and charges a one time fee, but it's much more poorly operated than HN.
      - zozbot234 5y ago
        SA used to be in a troll war with the old Slashdot.org tech forum. 4chan was a later 'spinoff' built by a Something Awful user, and taking much of its initial community from there. Given these facts I've never thought of Something Awful as especially free from toxicity.
        jart 5y ago
        They also used to be very toxic to the the Church of Scientology and Habbo Hotel. Nevar forget.
aaomidi 5y ago
It's also one of the most dog-whistled racist communities I've been on. Unfortunately, calling out that behavior gets you targeted as a SJW, or something else. But yeah, on some posts, I get really uncomfortable on HN.
- paulpauper 5y ago
  like what example
- gunfighthacksaw 5y ago
  I agree with your point of view even if I wouldn’t have phrased it like that. I’ve read / posted / shitposted stuff on here that would get me ratiod or yalled on other social networks, and would definitely lose me friends if I publicly repeated it, or family if I pushed it politically. I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head because I read hundreds of stories per week on here and only notice it when I see a (not downvoted) comment that makes me go WOOOOOOW.
  - aaomidi 5y ago
    Yeah I didn't really phrase it the right way when I posted that. But essentially my experience matches yours.
titzer 5y ago
Hardware Central forums circa 1998 was one of the funnest places that I recall. It was all overclockers and tinkers. It was pretty great!
suifbwish 5y ago
Same. If you compare this to reddit, it’s like comparing the senate to a local pub on free shots night.
hutrdvnj 5y ago
Sometimes I wonder if dang ever goes on vacation. Does he even sleep or take a break?
blooalien 5y ago
I was gonna say exactly this… It's absolutely true. Compared against almost every other comments/discussion forum I've tried/used, this is by far one of the overall generally sanest (free and open-ish) places on the modern web to participate in discussions.

mey 5y ago

Health, specifically diet/exercise, are also on this list of topics that typically get pretty toxic in my mind. Where the volume of voice outweigh the experts in the crowd.

sph 5y ago

> The topics that are liable to become flame wars change over time, currently it seems to be anything "Crypto" or "Online Advertising" as people have very strong feelings on both sides Oh yes, I've kept a very high opinion of this forum and its commenters once I skipped right past the daily 250+ comment posts about COVID-19 that have plagued us for 2 years. When it comes to tech, this place is an absolute treasure, but there's few things as odious as tech nerds improvising themselves as politicians, epidemiologists, microbiologists, logistics experts and activists just because they know how to use Google and follow some people on Twitter. The bitcoin craze wasn't even close to being as bad as the past two years.

paulpauper 5y ago
odious as tech nerds improvising themselves as politicians, epidemiologists, microbiologists, logistics experts and activists just because they know how to use Google and follow some people on Twitter. What is wrong with people do their own research, seeking their own info? Health experts, the mainstream media, and politicians do not have a monopoly on truth, and were wrong any times about Covid.
- dageshi 5y ago
  I read through a lot of those threads, there wasn't much of value there, just angry people shouting at each other mostly. I'm not saying it should be banned, but I too stopped reading them eventually because what's the point?
- ido 5y ago
  Just gently pointing out that you’re inviting the same heated discussion warned about above you.
  - paulpauper 5y ago
    I'm just disputing the notion that only experts are right. It's not about being pro-mask or anti-mask or pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine
- 5y ago

_ktx2 5y ago

I'm a very sparing user of social media, but after work I do love to play games. I play games with people I know IRL as well as a litany of people I've never met - true to my old 90's and 00's gamer days. Now, there's Discord. I was pretty skeptical the first time people implored me to join a Discord server, but I've found some communities are very dope. I've discovered that managing peoples behavior online is like trying to herd sheep in a straight line. The flock always goes forward, that much is constant. There are sheep on the left and on the right side of the herd that push the herd onto a new trajectory, a lot of the time I don't think they even know what they're doing, but if you take a step back you can watch it occur in real-time. A leader, who likely doesn't know they're a leader, starts acting in a certain way, which causes the shift. Then another leader clashes with that leader by proxy, which is what I describe as the other side of the herd. These bounding behaviors almost never keep the flock constrained, they cause the flock to split. These leaders are disposable though. They're placeholders for culture, language, collections of experience, values, etc that people identify with. It takes having conversations with troublemakers and making their effects known in plain language. Some people will get it, moderate their behavior despite their culture, language, collections of experience, values etc and some won't. Those who won't will either leave on their own or get banned.

mistermann 5y ago

> I think these criticisms aren't just relevant to HN, they apply to all social media and online conversation. I believe the reason is that epistemology (generally: theory of knowledge, seeking/determining what is actually(!) True) is not just hard, but it goes counter to the natural workings of the human mind. If the topic of a thread is a psychology paper dealing with human perception, bias, this sort of thing (an abstract discussion of the phenomenon), few people have difficulty realizing and acknowledging that this is a fundamental problem, in/with reality. However, if the topic of discussion is an object level matter, particularly culture war issues (but even technical ones, as the author notes), the mind seems to run in a different mode - gone[1] is the knowledge that the mind is subject to imperfect thinking, replaced by ~"perception is reality". And, one's intuition might suggest that intelligent people would be less prone to this problem, but substantial evidence[2] suggests that this is not only not necessarily true, but that intelligence exacerbates the problem (if one is usually more often correct than others, it is perfectly reasonable that their default confidence level in being correct would increase). What I think is also interesting: it seems to me that this one fundamental idea could be one of the main root cause problems with human interaction on the internet (or, in general, really), a topic most people seem to be very interested in - but oddly, these same people almost without exception (in my experience) have zero (or less than) interest in identifying plausible root causes of the problem and contemplating/brainstorming solutions - the exact opposite of what one's intuition might predict. I have yet to encounter a single human being that is even marginally seriously interested in this idea (and many(!) who recoil from it), and I have talked to hundreds of people about it, often in meetups and other places where the general problem with people getting along, fake news, etc is literally the sole topic of conversation. I am not optimistic that humanity can solve a problem that their mind does not grant them access to (assuming my theory has some truth to it). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-dependent_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-dependent_memory [2] A word that causes tremendous discord when humans are discussing object level matters

fragmede 5y ago
There are four ways in which people disagree. First is just miscommunication which is easily clarified. Second is working from a different set of facts. Third is same facts, different interpretation. Lastly is same facts, same interpretation, different principles. Discourse online straddles the four, with an unhealthy amount of ego and stubborness thrown in for good (bad) measure. Without a good way to get people on the same page first, aka people don't even read the linked article before commenting (tbc, guilty of that myself), there's zero real hope of getting people interested in epistemology and why we get it so wrong. And who could blame them? Examining why you believe something central to your identity threatens it and is very uncomfortable, and most people simply aren't here for that.